Description
This paper enacts archival resistance by contesting settler colonial visualities that erase Indigenous presence, memory, and resistance to settler violence on the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Grounded in over a decade of photo-ethnographic fieldwork across Texas, it challenges settler discourses that frame the borderlands as ahistorical sites of crisis, invasion, and lawlessness. These visualities omit settler necro-violence against Indigenous and Mexican-descent communities, contributing to ethnonationalist white replacement theories that lead to massacres like the El Paso Walmart shooting on August 3, 2019.
I exhume the material and visual intersections of memory, violence, and resistance across the Texas landscape to disavow mythologies of a depopulated Texas prior to colonial settlement, focusing on the legitimation of settler violence through architecture, monuments, and memorials. Most importantly, I engage the perspectives of memory workers, including Lipan Ndé, Karankawa Kadla, and local community members working towards justice and hemispheric solidarities that unsettle settler colonial legitimacy.
About the Speaker
Dr. Ramón Resendiz (He/Him/Él) is a Chicanx documentary filmmaker and media anthropologist from the south Texas borderlands. He is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oregon, where his research examines the intersections of violence, memory, and resistance of Latinx and Indigenous peoples in the national constructions of Texas, Mexico, and the U.S. His filmography includes collaborative documentaries ranging from immigration, social justice, human rights issues, and Indigenous resistance. Chief of these is El Muro | The Wall (2017), a feature-length documentary co-produced with the Lipan Apache Band of Texas. The film documented the historic resistance exercised by Lipan Apache/Ndé peoples against colonial occupation and persecution. It follows Dr. Eloisa G. Tamez’s legal battle against the U.S. Government’s use of eminent domain to build the U.S. Border Wall of 2006 on her ancestral lands.
Respondent
Emmanuel Ortega, University of Illinois Chicago
About the Borderlands and Latino/a Studies Seminar Series
The Newberry Borderlands and Latino/a Studies Seminar provides a forum for works-in-progress from scholars and graduate students that explore a variety of topics in the field. Seminars are conversational and free and open to faculty, graduate students, and members of the public, who register in advance to request papers.
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